Vacation Rental Marketing: The Advantages of SEO vs Google Adwords

Oct 9, 2013

Many of our property management software clients have asked us if we can promote their properties by paying with Google. The answer is: “No, because we have something much better to offer”. If you optimize a website so that it appears on the top results of Google, you will attract a lot of traffic without paying per click. The Google ads or Google Adwords will cost you a certain amount per click (PPC or pay per click) and direct paid traffic to your site, but at what cost?

To help vacation rental managers understand the importance of SEO, we have come up with some advantages of investing time into SEO rather than money into Google Adwords.

This graphic demonstrates where you will find Google Adwords and organic search results or SEO optimized sites:

As you can see in pink, the sites that have been optimized for search engines appear on the top underneath the ads. If you compare this placement with a heatmap that shows where most visitors click, these are also the most clicked spots.

Statistics show that there is even a big difference from a top to a bottom position on the first page of Google. Therefore, the ultimate SEO goal is to position your vacation rental website as high up the page as possible.

According to a study from Chitika the first position gets 33% of all the traffic, diminishing dramatically after the third position. Bearing this statistic in mind, it is no wonder that vacation rental businesses are so keen to invest time into SEO.

What makes SEO more profitable than Google Adwords?

Google Adwords has the advantage that it brings traffic as soon as you pay for it. But equally, the traffic will stop whenever you do not publish the ads. It will maintain a certain level of traffic as long as you pay for it, but the traffic will not increase over time. This is the main difference between SEO and Google Adwords and strong contributing factor to why SEO is considered more profitable than Google Adwords. Take a look at the image below comparing the difference of SEO vs PPC over time:

With all of this being said you should always keep in mind that SEO is a long-term project to which you might need to dedicate 6 months or one year. Although it is a time-intensive task, the impact it will have on your vacation rental business in the long run will be hugely beneficial.

We hope we have shaped a better understanding of how SEO can benefit your vacation rental website. Please feel free to share with those of interest or comment any thoughts in the box below. Good luck with your website´s SEO!

If you are looking for a SEO optimized vacation rental website to increase bookings, request a demo today online or talk to one of our experts on the phone: +34 512 702 104.

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